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Datadog vs Groundcover Observability Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
3rd
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Ranking in AI Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)
Groundcover Observability P...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
47th
Ranking in Log Management
38th
Ranking in AI Observability
28th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.1%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Groundcover Observability Platform is 0.4%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.1%
Groundcover Observability Platform0.4%
Other95.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
EO
Software Engineer at FairMoney
Centralized observability has improved transaction monitoring and now reduces errors through faster troubleshooting
Groundcover Observability Platform is already very vast, and improving it requires proper training for even a software developer to be able to use it. A person in tech needs training to navigate the system. The UI is better, but it can be improved to include a more intuitive design that easily explains itself to users so that navigation is simpler. Many features are hidden, and you need someone who is experienced with the platform to direct you on how to view certain information or complete specific tasks and walk you through the process. It would be better if Groundcover focused more on simplifying the user interface and improving human-computer interactions of the dashboard to make it so easy for a new developer or specialist to navigate and get what they need quickly. Querying data from Groundcover is not easy if you do not have specific information. You cannot perform a wildcard search in the text box. If you go to the log and enter an error message, it will not bring any results for you. You must first specify the workload or pods you are looking for, then enter the error. You need to add tags and put in your strings to be able to search for your particular logs or errors. If you just put a wildcard search in the text box, it will not work and will appear as if there are no logs that relate to that search, when in reality the logs exist. Making it easier for developers, users, and specialists using Groundcover to navigate and get what they need without the help of an experienced person walking them through is very important. This improvement is not about functionality but more about making navigation easier.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We have way more observability than what we had before - on the application and the overall system."
"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"Straightforward to integrate and automate."
"The solution is good for complex integations which have lots of downstream and involve multiple combined systems."
"This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"The service catalog is very useful; we use this type of offering for our microservices applications, and it gives a good view of flow, which is a must when we have different developers working on different services, and having the trace and log features has been useful in order to locate the microservice for the on-call person."
"Groundcover Observability Platform scales effectively with our organization's growth as we add new environments and everything works great, and the migration from our old product went very smoothly, allowing us to deprecate it rather quickly."
"Troubleshooting is very fast compared to manual investigation or using the other forms of logging that we used to have, and downtime and errors have decreased because we are able to see our performance and workload pods performing better, increase CPU and memory resources as soon as usage goes above the threshold, and make our application more scalable and improve performance metrics, reducing the number of errors in the application by at least 70%."
"We switched to Groundcover Observability Platform primarily because of the difficult query syntax in our previous solution, and we chose Groundcover for their business model as they don't charge based on log storage, they provide the infrastructure, and from a security perspective, the data stays in-house, which wasn't the case with our previous tool."
"Groundcover Observability Platform has impacted my organization positively as it is the primary way we use observability in our company, so it has a significant impact."
"Groundcover Observability Platform has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to pay only for what I use since it is stored in the cloud, and I do not need to pay for buckets of 1 gigabyte, 5 gigabytes, or other options."
 

Cons

"Datadog is expensive."
"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."
"The pricing model can be quite complex and might benefit from more flexible options tailored to different organizational needs."
"​It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"The product could do better with its notifications. I want more technical support than conferences because technical support helps with setting up the product much easier."
"The pricing is a bit confusing."
"One of the improvement opportunities that we have identified in my project concerns how hard it is to manage an organizational structure when you have multiple things in one organization, and you want to provide some kind of isolation between them."
"I would appreciate the ability to eliminate incident.io and have all the alerting in one place."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of Groundcover Observability Platform as an eight out of ten; while I haven't experienced issues personally, I am aware they occasionally encounter some challenges."
"I think it would be beneficial to see the body and content of API calls in the traces as a possible improvement."
"Querying data from Groundcover is not easy if you do not have specific information."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
32%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Recreational Facilities/Services Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise100
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
What needs improvement with Groundcover Observability Platform?
I would appreciate the ability to eliminate incident.io and have all the alerting in one place. Currently, I am dropping the critical incidents from Groundcover Observability Platform to incident.i...
What is your primary use case for Groundcover Observability Platform?
Groundcover Observability Platform serves as my primary observability system, and day-to-day, I am viewing the logs, metrics, and the performance of my application that is deployed in Kubernetes. I...
What advice do you have for others considering Groundcover Observability Platform?
My advice for others looking into using Groundcover Observability Platform is that once people try it, they will understand how easy and good it is, but it needs to get a chance. Most people workin...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Groundcover Observability Platform and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.